Travel time enabled bus route navigation system experiment in Beijing

Common bus route navigation system provides distance and transferring information based on the user-determined start point and end point on the map. This paper presents the research and experiment of an advanced bus route navigation system in Beijing, which can additionally provide travel time information from start to end. The travel time is predicted based on statistical and real-time traffic information. In Beijing, about 10000 taxies send GPS data to a traffic information center to generate real-time traffic data, and the center accumulates the historical traffic data for generating statistical database. Field test of our system was carried out in January 2007, and the experiment result shows the real-time and statistical traffic information can be used not only for car navigation system, but also for public transit service. In our experiment, the average error rate of predicted travel time is about 10%, which is comparable to car navigation system.